Tuesday, June 12, 2018

On Writing #153 : Lorri Neilsen Glenn

Writing, Attention and Words from the
Wise

Lorri
Neilsen Glenn

Every so often
something shatters like ice, and we are in the river of our existence. We are
aware.–Louise Erdrich

Why
do I write? I think it’s because writing forces me to pay attention. The worn
decals on the repairman’s flatbed truck, a grimace on the face of the young
mother struggling to lift the rain-soaked stroller into the bus, the nest of
tubes hooked up to my mother’s arm in the ER. These moments of human despair,
joy, resilience and triumph are atoms in our macrocosm, ordinary stardust,
according to theoretical physicists--and, of course, Joni Mitchell. They’re the
basic stuff of life. Paying attention, according to philosopher and activist Simone
Weil, is the purest form of generosity.

When
I turn the pen inward, paying attention to my own responses to losses or grief or
perplexity, I am buoyed by the revelations; buoyed, that is, until the words begin
to ask me uncomfortable questions. Who do
you think you are? What have you learned? Are there other perspectives you’re
not listening to?

Or,
as Lee Maracle says: Where do you begin
telling someone their world is not the only one?

When
I read poetry and prose, I am, to paraphrase the Brazilian activist Paulo Freire,
reading worlds. I’m in the hold of the ship with Aminata Diallo, at the
Colonel’s table with Carolyn Forché as ears fall to the floor, walking in the
reserve’s graveyard with Louise Bernice Halfe.

I linger
inside the richness of another universe, admire the exquisite workings of the
human imagination.

Reading
can challenge me, but writing seems to ask more. If I truly attend to what’s
going on around me, my assumptions will be pried apart and I’ll be pushed into
uncertain territory. Most writers know this uncertainty. And, as Pema Chödrön says:
Sticking with uncertainty is how we learn
to relax in the midst of chaos.

And,
lately, that’s where my mind is: in chaos. Climate disasters, political goat
rodeos (as one wag put it), shootings, unsafe water in countless Indigenous communities,
the volume of the abhorrent and absurd raising higher and higher. Add to those
the cold breath of mortality—time is short. If it’s critical that I pay
attention now, and I believe it is, how much attention -- and to what -- is too
much? too little?

Chaos
finds me measuring out my life in the online equivalent of Eliot’s coffee
spoons. My mind floods with inchoate fury at another incidence of violence
against women, BIPOC and non-binary people; erasures of whole communities; and
the rising tide of everyday mean-spiritedness and injustice. I am over aware.

And torn:
the written word seems impotent.

Yet more
necessary than ever.

Enter
the uncomfortable questions. Who needs
your privileged tears? Yes, you’re mortal, so where will you focus your
efforts? Why can’t you, like the inimitable Diane Lockhart advises, work on keeping
your own little corner sane?

Albert
Einstein was right: The only thing that
can defeat absurdity is lucidity.

I admire
writers who overcome their uncertainties and work their way through chaos. I’ll
start with Einstein’s word, lucidity
–a word whose origins refer to light.

Simone
Weil said only beauty and affliction can pierce the human heart. When I first
began to write, I felt that truth in my bones. If I can step away from the
clamorous racket around me, if I am to effect any change or wrest any beauty
out of the goings-on in my corner, I have to return to the elemental, to small illuminations,
seek meaning again in particulars. My Métis grandmother’s enigmatic smile in
the last and only family photograph. The frenzy of gulls behind my neighbour’s
fishing boat, returning home.

Word
by word by word by uncertain word.

Lorri Neilsen Glenn’s latest book is Following the River: Traces of Red River Women (Wolsak and Wynn), a
multi-genre memoir about her Cree and Métis grandmothers and their
contemporaries. Professor Emerita at the Mount, Lorri is the author and editor
of fourteen titles, and her award-winning poetry and prose are widely
anthologized. Lorri has led writing workshops across Canada, and in Chile,
Ireland, Australia and Greece. She teaches in The University of King’s College
MFA program in creative nonfiction. @neilsenglenn